Why he matters
Before the Valley had Food Network chefs, it had Eddie Matney. He came from Massachusetts in 1986, opened a seafood restaurant in Phoenix, and for the next thirty years ran restaurants with his name on the door and his face on local television, where he was a regular cooking contributor. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Eddie’s Grill and then Eddie Matney’s were where much of Phoenix first met a chef who came out of the kitchen to work the room.
His Scottsdale chapter came late and lasted nine years. Eddie’s House, opened in 2008 at Indian School Road and Marshall Way in Old Town, was his most personal restaurant, by his own description: lamb with mint, his mother’s tabbouleh, Lebanese family flavors inside an American menu, and Eddie himself at the tables in a white chef’s jacket.
Where to find his mark today
Eddie’s House. Closed since 2017. The address, 7042 E Indian School Road, is now One Handsome Bastard, a small distillery bar.
The Estancia Club. The private north Scottsdale golf club where he became executive chef in October 2017; only members and their guests eat there.
A chef who hosted
Matney’s restaurants were built around him. Phoenix New Times described him at Eddie’s House in 2008 as hands-on, mingling with guests in his whites, and the menu read like a host’s: “East-Meets-West” tuna and halibut, Eddie’s House Chicken, mint-pesto lamb chops with cumin hummus, fattoush, Mo’Rockin edamame and shrimp, dueling tartares and a lobster bisque served as a “cappuccino.” He was candid about where it came from. “I’m of Lebanese heritage,” he told an interviewer in 2011, crediting his mother’s tabbouleh and his father’s grilling.
The business side was rockier. Wild Noodles, a fast-casual noodle chain he was involved in, reached about 20 outlets by 2007 and then failed. Eddie’s House filed for Chapter 11 in April 2014, with the Arizona Department of Revenue claiming more than $500,000, and his lawyer said the filing was mainly to reorganize and settle that dispute; the restaurant stayed open three more years. In June 2017 he sold it, and the space went to Blue Clover Distillery.
The club years
After the sale he spent a summer helping with the menu at Forest Highlands Golf Club in Flagstaff, then on October 17, 2017 started as executive chef of the Estancia Club in north Scottsdale. He told the Arizona Republic the move was about family, a predictable schedule and relief from the pressure of owning a restaurant. He was the second well-known Scottsdale chef in about a year to move from a restaurant to a private club, after Mel Mecinas left Talavera at the Four Seasons for Scottsdale National.
The full story
Eddie Matney co-owned and ran the Stockbridge Cafe in the Berkshires before he came west. In 1986 he opened Steamers Genuine Seafood in Phoenix, and in 1988 Eddie’s Grill, which made him one of the first Valley chefs whose name sold the restaurant. In September 1998 he and his wife and partner, Jennifer Blank-Matney, opened Eddie Matney’s in the Biltmore area; it later closed. He cooked for members at The Golf Club Scottsdale, partnered with Suns star Amaré Stoudemire on Stoudemire’s Downtown in 2006, and appeared on KTVK’s Your Life A to Z and on network morning shows.
Eddie’s House opened in May 2008 in Old Town Scottsdale, on the corner of Indian School and Marshall Way, just as the recession arrived. It lasted through it, through a Chapter 11 filing in 2014, and into the 2010s wave of slicker Old Town rooms, before Matney sold it in June 2017. He moved to the Estancia Club that October.
That is where the public record thins out. This page could find no reliable reporting on his work after 2017, so it does not say whether he is still at Estancia as of October 2026, and it gives no birth year because none of the sources it checked state one. What it can say is that for three decades the Valley’s idea of a chef’s restaurant, with the chef in the room, owed a good deal to him.